I promised almost three years ago when I started this web log for Samantha that there would be no postings about dirty diapers or potty training. Well, I guess I lied. But this posting isn't really about potty training -- it's about the fact that, at the age of 2 years and 10 months, Samantha has discovered the concept of privacy.

We were in the living room earlier this evening and she began taking off her clothes (a dress-up princess costume that she'd put on herself). I asked if she needed to use the potty and she told me yes, and that she wanted to use the big potty, which means she wants to use the grownup bathroom. So I took her over to the powder room, got her situated, and waited for her to do what she needed to do.

Now you have to understnad that there's a smoke detector on the ceiling of the foyer outside the powder room, and there's a boxer calendar on the opposite wall, both of which require facing away from the room to see them. Samantha sat for a moment, then looked at me very seriously and said "Daddy, I need to go by myself. In private. You can look at the alarm or the picture of puppies." And that's been her thing for the remainder of the day: "I need to go in private. You can look at [some random faraway object].

Did I mention that sometimes Samantha just cracks me up?

Today was a day of milestones for Samantha. The biggest one is that she's out of her toddler bed and into a real bed. She'd been saying for a couple of weeks now that she wanted a "big bed" like her mommy and daddy's. A friend of Amy's gave us a spare bed frame (headboard, footboard, side rails) that she had, and Amy spent a week painting it. All those hours watching 'Trading Spaces" must be having an effect on us.

Anyway, we got Samantha a nightstand too earlier this week (finally found one that matched her dresser well enough -- this child has the nicest furniture in the whole house) and her new mattress was delivered today, so we took her changing table and toddler bed out of the room, moved her real bed and night stand in, rearranged all of the rest of the furniture, and now she's in a full sized bed. She was beside herself with excitement when it came time to go sleep in her own big bed. Maybe this will help her start sleeping through the night again. G-d, I hope so.

The other milestone sounds silly, but I got rid of all the toilet seat locks tonight. We're still buying diapers, but much less frequently. I think we're finally nearing the end of that stage too. Won't hear any complaints from me about that...

She's good enough on stairs that I could probably remove the baby gates as well, but those turn out to be too convenient for keeping the dogs confined to one half of the house or the other, so I guess they'll stay.

Sometimes Samantha just absolutely cracks me up. I came home from work earlier tonight and found her in the basement where Amy was sewing. Sam was standing in the doorway between the two halves of the basement with a box of styrofoam packing peanuts next to her, and a small mountain of peanut pieces -- halves, actually -- piled up in front of her.

She took a peanut out of the box, broke it in half, held one half in each hand then raised her hands up toward her chest (the hand gesture for "sit" when training a dog) while saying "Sit! Good sit!", then throwing the peanut halves on the floor. Breaking dog treats in half and holding one half in each hand like this is exactly what we do when we're telling both Ella and Tucker to sit at the same time. Then into the box for another packing peanut, break it in half, "Sit! Good sit!", throw the halves on the floor. Then another, and another, and another. Amy said she'd been doing that for some time, and from the size of the pile in front of her I believed it.

I asked Samantha what she was doing and she told me she was "feeding the sharks, because they are very very hungry." She talks about sharks a lot after our last trip to the aquarium where she saw a couple of them swimming in the big tank. Not as often as the talks about "my friend the lionfish", but often enough. I asked if sharks ate styrofoam packing peanuts and she told me, quite indignantly, that she was feeding them noodles. Not only was she feeding the pretend sharks pretend noodles, she was teaching them to sit. It was a riot.

Thinking of things she does that are a riot, I realized I never posted about her friend the pumpkin.

A couple of weeks before Halloween we bought a couple of big pumpkins for carving and a small sugar pumpkin that Samantha wanted. We explained that we would make jack-o-lanterns from the big ones and that the small ones were for cooking to make pumpkin pie or pumpkin cookies. (Helpful hint: If you're going to carve a jack-o-lantern using power tools, do it OUTSIDE. I'm still cleaning pumpkin guts out of the corners of the kitchen ceiling.)

Samantha carried that sugar pumpkin around for two weeks. She talked to it and slept with it and told it stories. She called it "my friend the pumpkin". She washed it with a wet washcloth when she thought it needed a bath, and wrapped it in a blanket when it got cold. She really took impressively good care of it, in fact.

Then one day she carried it over to Amy, held it up in both hands, and said "Cook it!". Yeah, you heard that right. After two weeks of tender loving care, she decided -- insisted, really -- that it was time for mommy to cook her friend the pumpkin "so I can eat him." I found it hilarious, in a vaguely disturbing Jeffrey Dahmer sort of way.